An Exploratory Study of Youth Mentoring in an Urban Context: Adolescents' Perceptions of Relationship Styles

The goal of this study was to empirically distinguish a range of mentor relationships and to evaluate their differential influence on adolescent outcomes. The study makes use of data that were collected as part of a national evaluation of Big Brothers/Big Sisters of America. The evaluation included 1138 youth, ranging in age from 10 through 16 (M=12.25), who were assigned randomly to either a mentoring relationship or a control group and followed for 18 months. A series of analyses, based on the matched youth's accounts of the relationships, suggested 4 distinct types of relationships (i.e., moderate, unconditionally supportive, active, and low-key). The 4 groups tended to distinguish themselves from one another on the basis of perceived support, structure, and activity. Relative to the controls, youth who characterized their mentor relationships as providing moderate levels of both activity and structure and conditional support derived the largest number of benefits from the relationships. These included improvements in social, psychological, and academic outcomes. Implications of the findings for research and intervention are discussed.     

Shaping the Constitutional Dialogue on Federalism: Canada's Supreme Court as Meta-Political Actor

This article challenges the view that the Supreme Court hasbecome the predominant authority on the constitutional distributionof rights and entitlements among governments in the Canadianfederation. By assuming this position of supremacy, criticscontinue, the Court has usurped key policy functions that belongto political actors, a move that has undermined democratic governancein Canada. Against this view, we argue that the management ofCanada's federal constitutional architecture is a responsibilitythe courts share with key political actors. We describe theCourt's role as meta-political, whereby the Court's federalismjurisprudence supplements rather than subverts the constitutionalrole of political actors. We develop our thesis in relationto two subnational constituencies with a distinctive constitutionalstatus in Canada: the province of Quebec and Aboriginal FirstNations.     

The Socioeconomic Impacts of Structural Adjustment

The 1980s were painful years of structural adjustment during which many developing countries abandoned statist economic models in favor of market-oriented paradigms. The proponents of structural adjustment, including international lending agencies such as the IMF and World Bank, argued that reforms were necessary to restore growth and curtail inflation. The opponents of adjustment claimed its macroeconomic results were not a foregone conclusion and, regardless of them, such changes would drastically affect the already precarious position of the poor. We use data from sixteen Latin American cases to examine the socioeconomic impacts of structural adjustment. Adjustment was weakly associated with growth, and reform did seem to reduce inflation. Counterintuitively, the extent of structural adjustment appears to be negatively associated with both poverty and inequality. Finally, empirical data show that low levels of growth or even mere economic stability are the best remedy for poverty and inequality.     

Pathways to work for low‐income workers: The effect of work in the temporary help industry

This paper provides new evidence to inform the policy debate about the effect of a newly important industry—the temporary help industry—on the labor market outcomes of low‐income workers and those workers who are at risk of being on public assistance. The core issue of whether temporary help work harms the long‐term prospects of disadvantaged individuals depends critically on the alternatives available to the worker. Temporary employment results in labor market outcomes that are better than not working at all. For example, while nonemployed public assistance recipients have only a 35 percent chance of being employed a year later, those who were in temporary employment have almost twice the likelihood of being employed in the same period. These findings, if correct, would support the use of temporary agencies by welfare programs. © 2003 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management     

'All things richly to enjoy': Economics and Politics in Locke's Two Treatises of Government

For all its importance, what is actually said about money in Two Treatises is highly obscure. Comparison with Locke's 1668–74 writings on interest reveals a common understanding of the function of money, akin to that of contemporary mercantilists, which illuminates many difficulties in the chapter on property. These writings are the source of the main economic concepts in the Treatises ; namely, labour as the active source of wealth (which along with the Roman Law notion of self-ownership provides the basis of Locke's theory of property); money overcoming the 'spoliation limit' on the accumulation of consumables, and the idea that money is created by and derives its value from consent (which Two Treatises exploits as a justification of the unequal distribution of property). Finally, the early writings suggest how implausible it is to read a labour theory of exchange value into the Treatises .